Irony, Thy Name Is Government

Also incompetence, but it's the irony I'm mainly appreciating here.

This morning at around ten, the Coast Guard carried out some exercises on the Potomac near the bridge where President Obama's motorcade passed by on his way to a 9-11 memorial event. Unfortunately they didn't think to, like, maybe notify any other agencies of what they were doing, so the exercise resulted in CNN reporting ten rounds fired at a suspicious vessel, and departures from the nearby Reagan International Airport being held for almost half an hour while the FBI scrambled to respond to the hostile incident.

Oops.

Good to know our tax dollars are being used wisely in these harsh economic times, to say nothing of the government's great respect for the time, money and feelings of its citizens (especially on this day -- come on, people!) who get caught up in this sort of fiasco, whether they were near the bridge and worried that they were going to be killed, or were stuck at the airport being made late for meetings, missing connections, etc.

The gold standard of irony is toward the end of the article, though, where it says:

The Coast Guard is part of the Homeland Security Department, which was created in response to the 9/11 attacks. The massive reorganization was designed to promote sharing of information within the department and among other law enforcement agencies.